Mediaeval History
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘Mediaeval History’
Richard the Lionheart told Philip, the martial Bishop of Dreux, to decide whether he was a bishop or a knight.
During the Third Crusade, Philip of Dreux, Bishop of Beauvais, spread the rumour that Richard the Lionheart had procured the assassination of Conrad of Montferrat; and after Richard was taken prisoner in Austria in 1192 he tried to make his detention as long and unpleasant as he could. In 1197, three years after his release, Richard stumbled across an opportunity for payback.
When Richard I heard that the town of Verneuil in Normandy was under threat, he made a vow that few could be expected to take so literally.
On March 20th, 1194, Richard I returned to England after two years of captivity to Leopold of Austria, with whom he had quarrelled on the Crusades. Richard’s brother John, who had tried to keep him locked up as long as possible, fled to the protection of Philip II of France; but barely a month had passed before Richard quitted his capital yet again, and was on his way back to Normandy.
Following the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, King Henry V instructed the Church of York to recognise the contribution of one of her eighth-century bishops.
Anyone who has watched William Shakespeare’s play Henry V knows that England’s unlikely victory at Agincourt on October 25th, 1415, came on the feast day of St Crispin and St Crispianus. What is less well known is that it was also a feast of St John of Beverley in Yorkshire, and that owing to a remarkable miracle the King himself instructed the Church of York to keep the day ever after with especial magnificence.
In 1607, settler Captain John Smith was captured by the Algonquin near the English colony at Jamestown, and watched his captors’ ceremonies with rising anxiety.
In 1607, English settlers founded a colony called Virginia on the east coast of North America, and established Jamestown in honour of King James I (r. 1603-1625). Settler John Smith (1580-1631), telling the story of the colony, recorded that in December that year he was captured by the Algonquin and would have been summarily executed, but for the intervention of a young girl.
Sir Walter Raleigh was within his rights to experiment with the Native American habit of smoking tobacco, but he should have told his servants first.
In 1585, Walter Raleigh led an ambitious project to found a colony at Roanoke Island in North America. The settlers returned after just one year, bringing with them a habit picked up from the Native Americans of that region: smoking tobacco leaves. His scientific adviser Thomas Harriot (?1560-1621) thought tobacco’s health benefits in our foggy isle so many that to list them ‘would require a volume by it selfe’.
When young Walter Raleigh first came to the court of Queen Elizabeth I he had little more than his wardrobe in his favour, and he wore it wisely.
Walter Raleigh was not always popular in England, as in John Aubrey’s phrase he was ‘damnable proud’, but his gracious demeanour in the weeks preceding his execution in 1618 changed that. One of the best-loved tales of Sir Walter goes back to the early 1580s, when he was still a relative unknown at court with little more than the clothes on his back — though they were all he needed.